Meta

Tag: profiles

A few months ago I started writing my first ever book. So far the experience has been both enjoyable and exciting, but one element of book writing is harder for me than the rest: Keeping track of characters. I have problems remembering stuff and fictional stuff is even harder to remember, which is why I’m a terrible liar.

To help keep track of characters as the book progresses I came up with a “template” character profile. The template contains the information on a single character, which I copy to a separate note in the MacOS notes app for each character and password protect to save them from prying eyes. So far this system has worked well for me, but I imagine it would fall on its face if I wasn’t continuously updating each note as the book progresses.

I thought I would share the template I use to profile each character in case anybody else finds it useful. So here it is.

Name – An obvious one really…

Age – Again pretty obvious

Description – A description of a character is helpful, for example, homeless man or police officer.

Aliases – Characters aren’t always known by their full name. Bill instead of William for example.

Physical Appearance – I find it helpful to help visualisation of the characters I’m writing about to jot down what they look like. Hair style and colour, height, eye colour, build, etc.

Skills – Handy for reminding me of which character might be able to pick a lock, or cook beans.

Relationships – The relationships a character has to other characters is a valuable piece of information to know, even if the relationship isn’t mentioned once in the book. Knowing that two brothers had the same upbringing might help build in common traits.

Book Appearances – A list of chapters that the character appears in within the book is helpful for referencing back to previous chapters.

Book Mentions – I list of chapters that a character is mentioned in but doesn’t appear in.

As always, I’m always happy to take advice on ways to improve my work, so if any authors out there have any tips on managing characters consistently throughout a book they’d be greatly appreciated.